Session Management in SafeClaw: Tracking Agent History
Session Management in SafeClaw: Tracking Agent History
When something goes wrong with an AI agent — and eventually, something always does — the first question is always: "What did it do?" Without a complete, reliable record of every action the agent took, you're debugging blind.
SafeClaw's session management system exists to ensure you never have to guess. Every action, every decision, every escalation is captured in a structured session that you can review, search, and replay.
What Is a Session?
A session in SafeClaw represents a single continuous interaction between an AI agent and your system. It begins when an agent connects to SafeClaw (or when SafeClaw detects agent activity) and ends when the agent disconnects, times out, or is manually terminated.
Each session captures:
- Actions — Every tool call the agent attempted, including the full parameters.
- Decisions — The classifier's decision for each action: allow, deny, or escalate.
- Context — The policy profile active at the time, the workspace boundaries in effect, and the agent's identity.
- Risk Signals — Any risk signals detected during the session, with their weights and categories.
- Human Decisions — For escalated actions, the human's response and the time it took.
- Costs — Budget consumption per action and cumulative for the session.
Storage Design
Session data is stored locally by default — no cloud dependencies, no data leaving your machine. We use an append-only log format inspired by write-ahead logs in databases. Each entry is written atomically, so even if SafeClaw crashes mid-session, the data up to that point is preserved.
The log format is structured JSON Lines, one entry per action. This makes it trivially parseable by standard Unix tools, importable into any data pipeline, and human-readable in a pinch.
For teams that need centralized session storage, SafeClaw supports forwarding session data to external endpoints via webhooks. But the local log is always the source of truth.
Session Replay
One of our most requested features was the ability to replay a session — to see exactly what an agent did, step by step, in chronological order. Session replay in SafeClaw shows each action with its parameters, the classifier's decision, the time elapsed, and any risk signals that fired.
This is invaluable for debugging. When a user reports that an agent "broke something," session replay lets you trace the exact sequence of actions that led to the problem. No guessing, no log correlation, no reconstructing timelines from git history.
Session replay is available through both the dashboard and the CLI. In the dashboard, it's an interactive timeline. In the CLI, it's a streaming output that you can pipe to other tools.
Session Search and Filtering
As sessions accumulate, finding the relevant one becomes important. SafeClaw indexes sessions by timestamp, agent identity, policy profile, and action types. You can search for "all sessions that included a deny decision" or "all sessions where the risk score exceeded the warning threshold."
The search API is documented in our docs and supports the same query syntax in both the dashboard and the CLI.
Privacy Considerations
Session data may contain sensitive information — file contents, command arguments, environment variables. SafeClaw's secrets redaction engine operates on session data too. Secrets detected in action parameters are redacted in the stored session, so your audit log doesn't become a liability.
You can also configure session retention policies: auto-delete sessions after a configurable period, or keep only sessions that contained escalations or denials.
Get Started
Session management is enabled by default in SafeClaw. Every action is tracked from the moment you install it. Explore the session viewer in the dashboard, or use safeclaw sessions list in the CLI. Full details are in our documentation, and the implementation is open source on GitHub.
A safety tool without session history is like a security camera with no recording. We built session management to ensure you always have the full picture.